The invention relates to a feeder for feeding cut pieces of wood from an accumulation conveyor to a carrier conveyor.
Feeding is a processing step in wood processing, during which cut pieces of wood, for example, cut wooden boards, are transferred from a non-cyclic conveyance into a cyclic conveyance. In this case, the cut pieces of wood are provided in the noncyclic conveyance as an accumulated film of cut pieces of wood pressing against one another, wherein the cut pieces of wood are transferred individually by the feeder to a carrier conveyor, wherein one cut piece of wood is to be assigned per carrier of the carrier conveyor. Conventional feeders can have actuable rollers, lifting tables, or star wheels for this purpose, which transfer individual cut pieces of wood in the cycle of the carriers of the carrier conveyor.
This has the disadvantage that the cut pieces of wood have to be strongly accelerated during the feeding, wherein different acceleration movements of the cut pieces of wood frequently occur due to the different geometries and due to the inhomogeneity of the workpiece, because the cut pieces of wood sometimes differ strongly from one another in the physical properties, or one cut piece of wood is not completely grasped by the feeder. Movements of the pieces of wood which are not guided in parallel thus occur, which cause incorrect placement in the subsequent transfer into the carrier conveyor, and this has to be manually corrected again. This results in an increased susceptibility to failure in the region of the feeder, above all with an increasing number of cycles.